


Consecrated Ground

by equestrianstatue



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Divinity Kink (is that a thing?), M/M, Painplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 00:44:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20349538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: Aziraphale’s mouth burned. But not like hellfire burned, cruel and destructive, sizzling a hole through whatever it touched. This was that same terrible charge of ethereal electricity, conducted in the very fluid of Aziraphale’s being. Something that had seemed so outside of him, something ofheaven, something that wasn’t part of the Aziraphale who had lived six thousand years here with Crowley on Earth, careful and petty and kind. And yet here heaven had been, all this time, just past his lips.





	Consecrated Ground

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Освященная земля](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22115632) by [Lunatic_Blues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunatic_Blues/pseuds/Lunatic_Blues)
  * Inspired by [Stain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19122013) by [SleepsWithCoyotes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes). 

> This fic was written for [this prompt](https://good-omens-kink.dreamwidth.org/616.html?thread=2408) on the Good Omens kink meme, but also owes a lot to the bookverse fic [Stain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19122013), which I read very shortly after watching the show for the first time and clearly... internalised...

When Aziraphale kissed him, it tingled.  
  
If the kiss had been different— if it had been Crowley that had done it, if Crowley had been the one desperate and fearless enough to make it happen, maybe on the night after the Apocalypse, or fifty-odd years ago, or fifty-odd decades ago— perhaps he would have realised what was happening. It would have been a different sort of kiss, after all. A last resort, a nameless, wanting, needing thing. He would have held Aziraphale still and curled his fingers into his hair and licked into his mouth, pushed past the startled, breathy noise until Aziraphale gave in to it, clung to him, kissed him back so that they were both panting and messy and wet with each other— and Crowley wouldn’t have been able to miss it.  
  
But for one reason or another, Crowley had never done that. And now, in the warm, dim, half-holy light of the back room of the bookshop, Aziraphale was kissing him. _Aziraphale _was kissing _him_. Gentle, enquiring, his lips brushing against Crowley’s in a way that made his black heart ache with ancient, forgotten tenderness. A kiss that was the polite knock on a door. _Hello, I didn’t mean to disturb you, but I wondered if you’d mind terribly if—_  
  
Crowley pulled away from him, shocked despite being unshockable, and despite this being possibly the least shocking thing that had happened in the history of the world.  
  
“My dear,” said Aziraphale. He looked apologetic. “I’m awfully sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep— ”  
  
“No,” Crowley said, “it’s not that, it’s, I just didn’t— ” he drew in a sharp breath. His lips were tingling like they’d been brushed very carefully with sandpaper. His throat was dry. “Sorry. Can you— can you do that again?”  
  
Aziraphale smiled, and lit up the room, and then he did.

*

Crowley had never seen Aziraphale smite anyone, but he’d seen him think about it. The sack of Constantinople. A chattel market in Charleston. A bar raid in Soho. Crowley had tasted it in the air, the metallic lightning tang of a crackling, awful power, a storm that never came.

Crowley had been— frightened by it, he supposed, in a deep, instinctive way. Even though he couldn’t be frightened of Aziraphale, who pursed his lips and worried at the ring on his finger and didn’t call the thing down. He had been put on Earth to guard humans, after all, he said. His job was to save them, even when what they needed saving from was each other. For some reason, Crowley never pointed out that from what he remembered, Aziraphale had actually been put on Earth to guard a gate.

That divine righteousness had been distant and dreadful, creeping down Crowley’s spine and raising the hairs on the back of his neck. It had made him breathe harder, relieved not to be touched by it.

He hadn’t expected to find anything like it here, in the softness of Aziraphale’s human body. That after days of sweet, chaste kisses that made Crowley’s skin prickle with the shock of their sincerity, Aziraphale would say, “I was thinking, perhaps we could try— well— ” and kiss him properly, mix their unnecessary breath, coax Crowley’s tongue into the heat of his mouth.

Heat was the right word. Probably. In that there wasn’t a human word for it, this not being a human sensation. Aziraphale’s mouth burned. But not like hellfire burned, cruel and destructive, sizzling a hole through whatever it touched. This was that same terrible charge of ethereal electricity, conducted in the very fluid of Aziraphale’s being. Something that had seemed so outside of him, something _of heaven_, something that wasn’t part of the Aziraphale who had lived six thousand years here with Crowley on Earth, careful and petty and kind. And yet here heaven had been, all this time, just past his lips.

Crowley stumbled backwards, gasping. His body, presumably out of sheer human inability to process what it was experiencing, had made a significant effort.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale murmured, worried, but Crowley held up a hand.

“No,” he said, “Sorry. ’sfine. Just— ”

“Nerves,” said Aziraphale, nodding sagely.

“No, not _nerves_,” said Crowley, who wasn’t about to actually explain himself, but couldn’t, it seemed, let this stand. If there was one place he wasn’t going to be nervous, it was here, in Aziraphale’s familiar cluttered little cupboard of a backroom. Bundles of theatre programmes and newspapers open at the crossword page lay around them, scattered on top of the primitive computer that Crowley had forced upon Aziraphale, to his genuine bafflement, somewhere in the heady days of the dotcom boom. “Why would I be nervous?”

“I don’t know,” said Aziraphale, “Maybe— ”

But then Crowley had come back to him again, crowding him up against the wall. He let their bodies rest against one another, let himself insinuate his way between Aziraphale’s thighs.

“I didn’t know if you’d be interested,” said Aziraphale, pleasure in his voice.

“Interested? Angel, what planet have you been— how could I possibly not be interested?”

“I didn’t know if this,” Aziraphale said, indicating, apparently, Crowley’s effort, “was really your sort of thing.”

“Aziraphale, I’m a _demon_. This is part of the job description.”

“Exactly. I thought it might just be something you did for work. Not as a hobby.”

“Um,” Crowley said, trying not to think too much about his work-life balance. “Well. I don’t know if I have a job any more, strictly speaking, so…” He rolled his spine and his hips, a quick, clever ripple, so that for a moment his effort pressed against Aziraphale’s leg.

Aziraphale hummed, and smiled, and leaned forward to kiss his mouth just as he reached down to feel the outline of Crowley’s cock with one hand. The kiss was quick, closed-mouthed, but the brief fizzle of both sensations at once was— indescribable. Crowley made a noise that he wasn’t sure the Earth had heard before.

“Would you mind?” Aziraphale asked him.

“Would I _mind_,” said Crowley, breathless, impatient. He was already tugging open his belt.

He didn’t mind. He didn’t mind the impossibly thorough way that Aziraphale investigated the process of touching his cock, the way that he ran his fingers along it like the spine of a book, and eventually wrapped his hand around it, but just loosely enough that Crowley dropped his head forward against Aziraphale’s shoulder and said, “Oh, come _on_— ”

“Yes, of course,” said Aziraphale at once, as if he had never meant to tease, and maybe he hadn’t, maybe he’d just been interested, cataloguing even now. Crowley held tightly to Aziraphale’s hips as Aziraphale dragged his warm, soft hand up the length of him, pressing forward into the touch, hissing between his teeth. Aziraphale’s other hand came round to rest, unacceptably gently, on the back of Crowley’s hair. Crowley raised his head again.

“Oh, I wish we’d done this earlier,” Aziraphale said, his eyes bright.

“Yeah,” Crowley grated out, very coolly. “Could’ve— after the baby came— ”

“Mm,” Aziraphale agreed. “Or in the blackouts. Charlemagne’s court. Or, oh, do you remember dear old Athens— ”

He did. Crowley remembered Aziraphale walking in the gardens of the Academy, deep in conversation with an old bloke with a big forehead, just like he remembered Aziraphale everywhere: a magnetic point of light. They honestly hadn’t been looking for each other, in those days. They just kept crossing paths. At the time, he’d thought it was a coincidence.

Aziraphale pressed a wet, white-hot kiss to the column of his neck, and Crowley’s puzzled, desperate human body came in seconds.

When Crowley began paying attention again, Aziraphale, pleased, was running his fingers through his hair and almost certainly ruining it, and murmuring something about dear Kit Marlowe that Crowley was going to need to ask him to repeat in far more detail later.

Crowley sucked in a steadying breath. The pain that had bloomed in the skin below his ear was transient and fading, and he felt looser, calmer, more languid. When Crowley looked at him, Aziraphale was smiling and glowing, metaphorically but also very slightly literally, and when Crowley put his hand between his legs he pressed forward into it at once, and said, “Oh, good.”

Crowley had some theories. It seemed prudent to test them. And Aziraphale was right, it was good, and possibly also Good, when Crowley slipped his hand next to his skin, and curled his fingers around his flesh, and wrung Aziraphale’s pleasure from him. He hadn’t thought, he hadn’t imagined— well, yes, he _had_ imagined Aziraphale like this, flushed and wanting and pliant against him, but he had always assumed the satisfaction of it would be quite different. That it would come from a debasing, a falling, a temptation into sacrilege at Crowley’s hand. He didn’t know what this was.

When Aziraphale finished it was with a small groan in the back of his throat, his head tipped back against the wall, and, as Crowley had expected, it hurt. Only some of Aziraphale’s come caught him, on his fingers and on the back of his hand, but it scalded: a bright, flaring rush that Crowley gritted his teeth against, trying not to show it. Although Aziraphale had his eyes closed, so he might have got away with it anyway.

Crowley left the stuff on his hand for as long as he dared, gently flexing his fingers. The first burst of pain had subsided quickly, and now it was more a mixture of shivering indulgence and discomfort, a kind of celestial pins and needles. It was— bearable.

Crowley was about to ask for a handkerchief, assuming from experience that Aziraphale would have three to four currently on his person. But then, he thought: better to check, now, before— and brought his hand to his mouth, flicking his tongue out to taste. This, too, was bearable, just. Aziraphale’s seed settled on his tongue like some unholy mixture of Absinthe and antifreeze, a split-second of perfect agony before it dissipated. He swallowed, and it was gone. Crowley thought, vaguely, of the forces of darkness enveloping the light. Or of a little spark of something good inside him. Depending on which way you looked at it.

Aziraphale was looking at him as if Crowley had done something that he probably ought to disapprove of, but didn’t. Which, to be fair, was how Aziraphale looked at him most of the time. Aziraphale raised his eyebrows. Crowley shrugged.

“Do you know what I think?” Crowley said.

“What’s that?”

“I think we should get smashed. Right now. I think maybe we should really go for it.”

“What a very good idea,” said Aziraphale, and hitched up his trousers.

*

Thousands of years of human history surrounded them, staring down at Crowley from the bookshelves. Myth, legend, war, poetry, prophecy. Cookery. Gardening. Quite a lot of science fiction, too, these days.

Crowley was knelt before them all, or rather he was knelt before Aziraphale. He had one hand on Aziraphale’s hip, and the other bunched in the front of Aziraphale’s shirt, pushing it up and out of the way. Aziraphale, half-standing, half-leaning against the arm of the sofa, was murmuring a litany of indecently kind things, and leaking a steady stream of holiness into Crowley’s mouth.

Crowley had planned this carefully, and with tactical advantage very much in mind. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but the front door of the bookshop had slammed itself shut a short while earlier, and the sign had flipped itself decisively to ‘closed’. (In fact, it would later transpire that in the heat of the moment, the door had also produced three extra ‘closed’ signs and a dangerous structures notice.) Behind Aziraphale’s soft, surprised noises of pleasure and praise, there were the sounds of summer outside in the street: friends and couples and tourists, baristas on breaks, shrieks of laughter. A glass smashing outside the pub a few doors down. Crowley couldn’t see the shadows of people passing behind the drawn blinds, but he could sense them.

He closed his eyes and inhaled. Aziraphale smelled of dust and tea and sugar, and below that, a low, warm current of arousal. One of his hands was cradling the side of Crowley’s face, the other resting on top of his head. He said, in what seemed to be a final bid at understatement, “Oh, my.”

The burn on the back of Crowley’s tongue was bitter as sin, but at least he didn’t need to worry too much about the mechanics. Some things were easier when you didn’t have to put the effort in, or rather when the effort was more metaphysical than physical. Crowley widened his jaw, and imagined taking all of Aziraphale’s cock into his mouth, and then he simply did.

Aziraphale made a high, sharp noise. “Oh,” he said, thickly, as Crowley flattened his tongue, and then swallowed, so that his throat tightened in a distinctly inhuman sort of way. “_Oh_, that’s— ”

Crowley pressed his mouth, his whole self, impossibly further forward. He tightened his hand in Aziraphale’s shirt as Aziraphale’s fingers curled in his hair. He knew a thing or two about speed and performance.

“I think perhaps we ought to go— ” said Aziraphale, with some audible difficulty, “upstairs, or— ”

But Crowley kept it up, for as long as he thought Aziraphale could take it. Or for almost as long, until the muscles of Aziraphale’s thighs were beginning to shake, until his fingers in Crowley’s hair were no longer curling but gripping. They didn’t hurt, which was a shame, really, since it might have taken the edge off if they had.

Crowley opened his eyes, and slid backwards, smooth and sinuous, and Aziraphale gasped at the air on his wet cock. “Crowley,” he breathed, “If you’d give me a moment— ”

Crowley didn’t. He wrapped his hand around the base of Aziraphale’s cock, and then leaned forward to give it a precise, wicked flicker of his tongue, so that Aziraphale shuddered and clutched the arm of the sofa and tensed all over.

If Crowley knew Aziraphale, and he did, any parts of the angel’s mind that weren’t being sucked straight out of his body would by now be scattered hopelessly among the dust in the air around them. Whatever stray thoughts remained would be skittering between the bookshop door and the teetering pile of first-edition Forsters dangerously close to Crowley’s left foot— with, crucially, no spare bit of attention left to notice whatever this was going to do to Crowley, in a minute.

Aziraphale gasped, and Crowley put his mouth back on him before he came.

Crowley was ready, but even so, it was all he could do not to choke. It was like being scoured through with light, bleached with it. Aziraphale pulsed onto his tongue, and then scorched his throat. Crowley squeezed his eyes closed, forcing himself to keep his mouth a soft, open circle. He felt his whole body shiver, felt the screaming protest of the particles of him that were pure demon at the intrusion of the core of an angel. Felt the increasingly familiar lightheadedness, the inevitable surge of arousal.

When it was over, Crowley stayed where he was for a moment longer before he let Aziraphale’s cock out of his mouth. His eyes were watering. He pushed his face up against the soft jut of Aziraphale’s hip, gritting his teeth. He let the pain subside into an ache, and let Aziraphale’s fingers wander carefully down from his head to stroke his cheek.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said again, and he sounded a little scandalised, a little astonished, a little delighted.

Crowley wrinkled his nose, wished fleetingly for his glasses, hoped for the best, and opened his eyes. When he looked up, Aziraphale was gazing at him with an expression somewhere between idiotic and adoring.

“That was dreadfully wily of you,” he said, as Crowley pushed himself to his feet.

“Got to keep my hand in,” Crowley shrugged, his voice coming out about as smoothly as he could have hoped.

“Mm,” Aziraphale said, and didn’t point out that neither of them had to do anything they didn’t want to, really, these days. His eyes had drifted to Crowley’s groin, where his trousers were proud to present the fact that he was achingly erect. “Dear boy,” he said, “I would be, oh, _very_ happy to return…”

“No,” said Crowley, a little too quickly— although he was looking at Aziraphale’s mouth, and Lucifer preserve him, the mere thought of it pressed against his cock, the agony of his lips, and whether such a sensation would even be survivable, made his skin flush with need and shock and shame. Aziraphale looked quite surprised, and not a little confused, until Crowley said, “It’s only— I want you to, um, to kiss me.”

Aziraphale’s eyes softened, and he said, “_Oh_,” sounding so pleased that Crowley suddenly felt guilty, on top of everything else, for lying. Even though it wasn’t a lie, in the strictest sense: he did want Aziraphale to kiss him, wanted it as much now as he’d wanted it for, oh, six thousand years, must have been. All the millennia he’d spent circling around this fussy, friendly, funny little angel, half-enjoying the righteous clash of metaphorical swords, half-enjoying the less metaphorical clink of glasses and the meandering conversations deep into a thousand and one nights. He’d always liked Aziraphale. But the idea that he liked what Aziraphale _was_, that some nearly-broken thread in his soul was tugging him towards this dangerous, bottomless well of grace, was— troubling. To say the least.

Crowley did want Aziraphale to kiss him. He wanted the kiss to be exactly as deep and soft and sweet as it was, and he wanted the new, piercing sensation of the sting of Aziraphale’s saliva mingling with the last bitter burn of his come on Crowley’s tongue. He wanted to be kissed until his mouth was numb, and until he came, shaking, into the palm of Aziraphale’s hand.

* 

Crowley had taught himself to dream, out of curiosity, somewhere around the second millennium BC. Being occasionally required to infiltrate the subliminal state of humans, and also having encountered the strange propensity of humans to describe their dreams at length in the presence of anyone who would listen, he had been wondering for a while what all the fuss was about.

For a demon, discovering the presence of a subconscious wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the human experience of puberty, in that it involved the slightly alarming realisation that one might not be as firmly in one’s own driver’s seat as previously supposed. Crowley was surprised to find he dreamed mostly about things that seemed inconsequential when he was awake, but that some corner of his mind had gathered up and kept hold of without his knowledge, ready to be spread out before him now like a deck of cards, and examined in puzzlement. His first dream had been about the building of the palace of Knossos. But instead of his real memory, watching from a distance under the shade of a tree, in the dream he wandered through the half-constructed palace itself. He felt the roughness of stone as he trailed his fingers along the walls, and the sun beating down on the back of his neck. People, labourers, slipped around him as if they couldn’t see him. When he woke, he found the substance of the dream difficult to cling to, insubstantial and slippery, even as he tried to rub the stone-grit from the tips of his fingers.

At the time, Crowley had only just been approaching the idea that he might have the ability _not_ to do what was determined of him by the Lords of Hell. That, indeed, he could actually will himself to do the opposite, if he was feeling lazy, or just didn’t fancy it. But the idea that not only might there be parts of himself that lay outside the jurisdiction of Head Office, but parts of himself that lay outside of the jurisdiction of _himself_, was a bit of a revelation.

Crowley might not have been the only demon with a subconscious, but he was the only demon who’d bothered to find out that he had one. He could choose not to dream when he slept, but mostly he didn’t see the harm in it. Occasionally he had interesting conversations with people he’d never met, or visited cities long destroyed. He viewed the experience as a sort of cognitive holiday.

The one unifying characteristic of every dream Crowley had ever had was that they were concerned exclusively with earthly experience. It came, he supposed, of dreaming being a human phenomenon. He did dream of other demons and angels occasionally, although not all that often, and always in their earthly guises. For a while there had been a recurring dream of delivering an excruciatingly boring progress report to Hastur in a graveyard, in which Crowley was trying very hard to wrap the whole thing up in order to get away on time, although he was never quite sure where it was he was going afterwards. And Aziraphale appeared, now and again, naturally. He was usually reading.

And so when Crowley first dreamed of heaven, he thought, to begin with, that he was really there. Not that he was back in heaven as it once had been, and as he once had been, golden-eyed and white-winged. But instead that he must have been hauled up there by the scruff of the neck, for— he couldn’t think what. The idea of it was unprecedented.

The light here was blinding, seeming to split open his eyes and his mouth and his mind. It had been one thing to come here wearing Aziraphale’s body, but as a demon, unprotected, it hurt, itched, burned. Crowley’s knees buckled and he bowed his head, but the light pierced his eyelids nonetheless.

He must be here to be issued a warning. Or a punishment, for what he had made of Aziraphale. Well, he had taken punishment here before, twice over, and once in Aziraphale’s name. He could do it again.

Crowley became aware very gradually of the sensation of something on the top of his head, holding him still. A hand, but not a hand. A hand made of light. For a moment it burned like all the other light burned, but then it didn’t. It turned cool, blessedly cool, a balm that seemed to trickle down through his head and into his aching body.

Crowley wasn’t breathing, not just because it wasn’t necessary, but because he was very, very afraid. Afraid that he wasn’t being punished after all, but that he was being— that his _sins_ were—

The hand on his head changed. He was aware of it as soon as it happened, even though the sensation was much the same. But now the hand was a real hand, its fingers in his hair, and besides, Crowley could raise his head again. When he looked up, his eyes slitted against the light, he saw it belonged to Aziraphale, bright and radiant in a fluttering white robe, his eyes blue and lovely. Crowley opened his mouth and breathed in. Aziraphale smiled at him.

Crowley jerked upright, his body plastered in sweat, the bedsheets clinging to his skin. He was breathing heavily, his heart pounding, a shot of adrenaline released into his body from his suprarenal glands. All thoroughly human bodily responses. And there had been another one, too. The sheets were sticky with more than sweat.

Crowley stared at the stain, slightly amazed, as his breathing slowed. He was professionally familiar with the concept of a wet dream, but not through personal experience. He was surprised to find he was embarrassed by it. Perhaps that response, too, was worked somehow into the DNA of the human body. But then, he supposed, as he pushed his hair back from his forehead, the shame wasn’t so much to do with the physiological response as with what had caused it.

Could a demon feel shame? Incapable of it, surely. Wasn’t that part of the job description? Well, maybe it had been switched back on when they took him off the payroll.

It wasn’t until Crowley had showered, dressed, and snapped everything clean and tidy, that it occurred to him to wonder what a demon ought to be ashamed of. Falling, or looking up.

*

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Crowley said, before the part of his brain that usually intervened with his voicebox had a chance to stop him.

Aziraphale was lying on Crowley’s bed beside him, pale and comfortable, his puff of white hair stark against the charcoal pillow. He looked utterly relaxed. Blinking his eyes open from what must be the celestial equivalent of a post-coital nap, he said, “Hmm?”

“I didn’t think you would be like this,” Crowley clarified. “I thought it would be— forbidden. A sin. You know. So I thought it would be… more complicated. For you.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.” Aziraphale wriggled around to look at him. “Lust is a sin, yes, technically, although the definition of that is quite a lot narrower than you might think.”

“Mm,” agreed Crowley, half-smiling. “Certainly if you’re looking to narrow it.”

“You know perfectly well,” said Aziraphale, also smiling, “that love is divine, and that the definition of _that_ is very broad indeed.”

“Yours is.”

“Yes,” said Aziraphale, rather ruminatively. “Well. There we are.”

“Hobby, then?” Crowley said, before his brain could get in on the act again. “Or work?”

“Oh, strictly personal. You know what they’re like upstairs, you can’t seriously imagine it as an… assignment…” Aziraphale’s mouth twitched in something like amusement. “But, you know. It’s easy, isn’t it, to love people? So I always thought, not that I was reporting it in, but if it spread a bit of happiness, cheered up someone’s day, then, well, it was _practically_ work.”

Crowley huffed a laugh. “Oh, sure.”

“It was!”

“With a demon, though. Surely that’s got to be off-limits.”

Aziraphale chewed meditatively on his bottom lip. “I mean, there’s nothing that _says_— that is, there’s not exactly an _edict_ on the subject— ”

“Do you know what I think?”

“I’m certain I’m about to find out.”

“If there were,” Crowley said, sounding quite as impressed as he felt, “an actual rule, I mean, you’d find a loophole in it before anyone had even managed to write it down and praise it as the Word of God.”

“Oh, come now, it’s not about _loopholes_, it’s about— ”

“Making sure nobody’s looking.”

“—not doing anyone any harm,” Aziraphale said, his eyebrows raised.

“_I_ think,” said Crowley, “you might be better at my job than I am.”

“I think you might be trying to get a rise out of me,” said Aziraphale, mildly. 

“No, I’m just— ”

It wasn’t so much that Crowley blinked and he missed it, for obvious reasons. It was just unexpected. And he was good at knowing what to expect from Aziraphale, or he used to be, anyhow. Aziraphale had leaned forward, before Crowley knew it, and licked quickly, ticklingly, at the base of Crowley’s neck. It was an odd, tender little crease of skin, and Crowley hadn’t for a moment prepared for the bright needle-point of pain at the end of Aziraphale’s tongue. He curled his shoulders, hissed only quietly. Drew backwards and half-turned away. And then went very still.

“Crowley,” said Aziraphale, after a moment, in a slow, unusual sort of voice that sounded like nothing so much as: _rumbled_. Put down that motorway marker and walk away.

“Mm?” Crowley said, anyway.

“What was that?”

As he turned back towards Aziraphale, Crowley tried to look as innocent as possible. He hoped Aziraphale might appreciate the irony. “What was what?”

“_That_.”

Aziraphale didn’t look, as Crowley had always imagined, worried. Or at least not only worried. There was a little of it in there, perhaps. But his expression was sharp, his eyes narrowed, lips pursed. The cogs of his clever old brain clicking together. Looking at the last clue in the Observer cryptic.

It was only a matter of time, obviously, before Aziraphale found out what was happening. Crowley had always known that; he wasn’t stupid. And neither was Aziraphale, more to the point. But Crowley had thought he’d establish the groundwork for himself first. So that he could explain it all properly, explain that this was— all right. Only he hadn’t quite had the time, yet, to get that explanation straight.

He’d have to wing it. Well, he hadn’t done so badly with that as a guiding principle for the last few millennia. He sighed.

“The thing is,” he began. Strong. “The thing is, um, you’re a bit…” Crowley rolled on to his back, because Aziraphale’s blue eyes were, suddenly, slightly too much. Crowley saw him in as he had been in heaven in his dream, and standing outside the library of Alexandria, and at the end of a church aisle in the Blitz. He pressed his tongue to the bow of his upper lip, and half-smiled. “Well. Beach in bare feet.”

There was the sound of Aziraphale’s mouth opening, a soft intake of breath. Crowley didn’t look, not yet. “Right,” said Aziraphale, after a moment. “You mean…”

“Not all of you,” Crowley said. “Um. Parts of you.”

“Parts of me,” Aziraphale repeated.

“Did you know?” said Crowley, and it came out sounding so blithely conversational he almost laughed.

There was a pause. Aziraphale said, “I knew there was something you weren’t saying.”

“Well. Now I have.”

Aziraphale didn’t sound… anxious, or upset, or hurt, or any of the things he probably ought to sound. But then Aziraphale did have, sometimes, in moments of particular tension, an air of unearthly calm. Not always. But now and again, when it mattered.

Crowley turned his head on the pillow towards him again, because the discomfort of looking away was overtaking the discomfort of looking. Aziraphale met his eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“I thought you’d be worried. Unhappy. I thought you might stop.”

Aziraphale said, “Why didn’t you tell me you liked it?”

The small, rough, hidden oyster-shell somewhere in the centre of Crowley cracked just a little way open. Dark and soft and shameful. It hurt.

“Because I don’t know why I like it,” Crowley said, which was more honest than he thought he’d meant to be.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Well. That’s all right.”

It took Crowley a moment to ascertain that he wasn’t being sarcastic. “Is it?”

“If we understood everything,” Aziraphale said, slowly, “about the world, even about ourselves, we’d be… well, we’d be God. Wouldn’t we? And I don’t think I’d like that very much at all.”

“No,” Crowley murmured. “Suppose not.”

Aziraphale drew in a breath, and said, “So. Parts of me.”

“Yeah.”

Aziraphale held his hand out, palm upturned, hovering near Crowley’s bare chest. “Can I…?”

Crowley nodded, and let Aziraphale cover his heart with one hand, and said, “Not your skin. That’s fine. Normal.”

“Oh. Right.”

“It’s when you, um. Your mouth, your tongue, anywhere on me. And when you come, it’s…”

“Right,” said Aziraphale again, voice level, although the skin around his mouth creased slightly, and he took his hand away from Crowley’s chest. Crowley assumed he was sifting through memories, of sucking idly on Crowley’s earlobe, of good-morning kisses, of coming down Crowley’s throat. “Oh, Crowley, I…” Aziraphale said, sounding for the first time more like Crowley had feared he would sound. Surprise. Regret.

“Don’t,” Crowley interrupted. “It’s fine.”

“Well, it’s not _fine_, exactly— ”

“But it is what it is. So.” 

“I don’t much like the thought of hurting you, you know,” said Aziraphale, after a moment. The sentence seemed to hang in the air above the bed, heavy with consideration.

“I know,” said Crowley. Let that curl its way up into the ether, too. “But…”

“What does it feel like?” Aziraphale asked.

“You mean— ”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Crowley, wondering how on Earth to describe what couldn’t be entirely an earthly sensation. “Depends on what’s happening. Sometimes it’s just a prickling sort of feeling. Sometimes more than that.” Aziraphale nodded. _Yes, go on._ Crowley sighed. “Like burning. On the skin, but also…” Crowley made a wiggling, indistinct gesture with his hand somewhere near his head. Wondered if it conveyed anything. “I don’t know. Burning isn’t the right word, either.”

Aziraphale said, softly, “I hope not.”

“Thing is,” Crowley said, “it could all just be a bit of a mistranslation, really. Body doesn’t know what to do with— well, with you. So it takes a wild guess. Pain. Seems like the right emergency response. Usually is, for humans.”

“But you…” said Aziraphale, carefully. He swallowed. “You like it, it makes you— ”

“Hard, yes,” said Crowley. He was looking at the ceiling again. 

“With humans, did you ever— did you like the same thing?”

“Don’t think so. Never really thought about it. Would have been blessed hard work for a human to actually hurt me. So it didn’t really come up.”

“Did you ever hurt anyone?”

Crowley turned his head round. “No, I— ”

“Who wanted to be hurt?” Aziraphale clarified.

“No,” Crowley said again, slower. “Wasn’t really my thing.”

“No. Of course. I just wondered.”

It was easy to love humans, Aziraphale had said. Was it? It was easy enough to like them. Admire them, even. Spend time with them. Crowley had been on the business end of a carnally-oriented temptation often enough, but not always. Sometimes, over the millennia, he’d just been restless, or frustrated, or bored. Distracted himself with his body. Let it want the things it was determined to want. That wasn’t difficult. But the other thing hadn’t really come into it.

He wondered what it would be like, to love someone for so short a time as a century. A decade. A night or two. Loving Aziraphale had been a constant, but Crowley wouldn’t have described it as easy.

“So anyway,” Crowley said, feeling the weight of the conversation pressing down on him from all sides, flicking his hand as casually as he could towards Aziraphale, “I don’t know if all this is accident or design. Faulty mechanism or built-in failsafe. But if it’s supposed to be a big cosmic ‘keep off’ sign, well, it’s not working very well, is it?” He allowed himself a grin. “One of God’s plain sight, ‘don’t eat’ jobs, do you reckon?”

“I don’t know,” said Aziraphale.

“I’m getting used to it, as well. I might build up an immunity. Not even feel it any more. You never know.”

“Maybe,” said Aziraphale, though he didn’t look particularly convinced.

“Not much we can do except try and find out, really.”

This was angling so openly that Aziraphale laughed at him, a small, warm, momentary noise. “There’s plenty of other things we could do together, you know. In the entire world.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Crowley, quite seriously. “Not now we can’t.” Frankly, if Crowley wasn’t at some point going to figure out how to manage getting fucked up the arse by Aziraphale without passing out, he might as well give up and die anyway. He decided at the last moment not to say this out loud.

“Well,” Aziraphale said. He leaned forward again, making a shuffling noise against the pillows, the sheets. Then, an inch from Crowley’s mouth, he stopped. Flicked his eyes down and blinked. “Oh…”

“Go on,” Crowley said, against his lips. “I can take it.”

Aziraphale kissed him, very, very carefully at first, more careful than he had ever been, even the very first time he’d done it. Mouth closed. Crowley could barely feel it. He brought his hand up so that his fingers brushed Aziraphale’s soft hair, his temple, his cheek, a damningly gentle gesture. Then he opened his mouth, just a little, and Aziraphale did, too. There it was, that familiar holy heat, making something coil in the base of his spine.

Crowley took a breath, and said, “Do it harder.”

Aziraphale looked at him for a moment, and then he did. He slid his hand around the back of Crowley’s neck, his fingers rubbing through the short hair at the base of his skull, and then he pressed forward and kissed him without mercy. Deep, slow, the slide of Aziraphale’s red-hot tongue making Crowley shiver. And there was no need to pretend otherwise, Crowley realised. He let a quiet groan of pained want slip out of his mouth and into Aziraphale’s, easy as anything.

Aziraphale pulled away and looked at him again. Crowley could feel the flush across his skin, the residual burn of his mouth wet with Aziraphale, left scalding on his lips. His whole body was tightening up, his chest heaving. He closed his eyes. Didn’t try to hide it. Let Aziraphale see.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, quietly. Crowley heard the slow sounds of movement, felt the change of weight on the mattress, and when he opened his eyes, Aziraphale was sitting up beside him, looking down.

Aziraphale bent his head forward, and pressed his mouth to the same patch of skin he’d licked earlier, just above Crowley’s collarbone. Lovingly, deliberately, flicking his tongue over it, even sucking, for a moment. Crowley’s breath scraped in his throat and his cock twitched between his legs and he might have made another noise.

“You’ll tell me,” Aziraphale said, hovering over him, his eyes wide, “if it’s too much?”

“Yeah,” Crowley rasped, lying through his teeth.

Crowley had known, of course, that Aziraphale would find out. He’d certainly hoped that Aziraphale would keep sleeping with him when he did. But what he hadn’t considered, at all, was the difference between a side-effect and a deliberate, inflicted sensation. He knew how to steady himself for the line of tender, stinging kisses that Aziraphale pressed across his chest, but not for the idea that Aziraphale knew exactly what they were doing to him. Aziraphale’s soft, comfortable weight was leaning over Crowley as he chose where to put his tongue, and Crowley writhed beneath him, pinned and flame-licked and mortified with arousal.

Then Aziraphale put his mouth on one of his nipples, and Crowley nearly came off the bed.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale, into his skin, sounding very interested. He breathed on Crowley’s nipple, scraped his teeth against it, and then sucked, properly.

It was agonising. The little nub of flesh was like a lightning conductor, sending jolts of awful brilliance through Crowley’s body, jabbing right into his extremities. Crowley’s jaw went tight, his veins on fire, his hips shifting helplessly. Then a blessed moment of emptiness, Aziraphale’s mouth gone, the air cold on Crowley’s wet skin, before Aziraphale’s tongue pressed against the other nipple. Crowley let out a pathetic sort of whimper.

“This is good,” said Aziraphale, rather as if he were recommending a surprisingly well-researched book. He flicked his eyes along Crowley’s body, to where his stomach was tensed, his cock filling. “Oh. Crowley, could you— Do you think you could come from this?”

“Uh,” said Crowley, who thought his body might be forgetting to allow oxygen into his brain, “I— God, probably— ”

“Do you want to?” said Aziraphale.

Crowley squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t— yeah, anything. Yes.”

“You could touch yourself,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley was breathless with the thought, for a moment, of the indignity of it, his own hand tight and jerking, Aziraphale doing nothing but swiping his tongue so very sweetly against his skin. “Or, oh, I can do both— ”

Aziraphale reached down with one hand, his knuckles brushing against Crowley’s cock, and Crowley pushed his hips up, blindly.

“All right,” said Aziraphale, and then the circle of Aziraphale’s hand slid around him. Crowley let out a sigh of relief, and Aziraphale gripped a little tighter, the exact edge of nice and rough that he’d learnt, over the last few weeks, that Crowley liked. “Good. Wonderful.”

There was a soft, wet sound. Crowley opened his eyes to see that Aziraphale had slipped two of the fingers of his other hand into his mouth, and was drawing them out to— oh, fuck. Aziraphale rubbed his wet fingers over one of Crowley’s nipples, laid his tongue carefully over the other, and dragged his hand slowly up Crowley’s cock.

There were no lines that joined up the stars. Humans had made those: looked up at the countless points of light scattered across the black void of the sky, and said, _Let’s try and make sense of this_. They couldn’t do it. It wasn’t possible for them to comprehend the scale or the point of the universe, because if they could, they’d be angels. But it had never stopped them from trying, from mapping roads that travelled unfathomable distances between celestial bodies, imposing their tiny sense of order onto something bigger than they’d ever know. One point to another to another to another, the three points of Crowley that Aziraphale was touching generating a circuit of light that was almost more than he could bear to feel. Because it hurt, but also because it was as if he were being excavated from himself, shaken to his ancient core.

“Aziraphale,” said Crowley, thickly, or at least it was what he thought he was saying. He had a horrible feeling it might have just been a collection of noises beginning in _Ah_—, and that at least one of them had been a whine in the back of his throat.

“Is this,” Aziraphale murmured, his breath soft on Crowley’s chest, “Do you— ”

“Yeah,” Crowley said, in answer to any or all of those questions. “I want— more, more of it, can you…”

He meant, in some unarticulated part of himself: _Fuck me, suck me off, put your tongue in me, anything, take me apart._ He didn’t know if he could take it. He thought his skin might fall off. He thought it might be worth it.

Aziraphale nodded, and Crowley’s breath caught in his throat. His damp fingers came away from Crowley’s chest, went back into his mouth until they were slick all over, and then down. Aziraphale let go of him with his dry hand, bit momentarily at the corner of his own mouth, and then dragged the ends of his two wet fingers along Crowley’s cock, from the base to the tip.

Crowley made a garbled, shocked noise. That one trail of fire had made his body contort with incredible, desperate pain, gone rigid with it, his muscles quivering. He gasped for air, and Aziraphale’s face was just above him, his other hand on the back of his neck, holding him steady, looking into his eyes.

“Dear boy,” he murmured, infinitely attentive, “should I— ”

“Do it again,” Crowley gritted out.

Aziraphale wrapped his hand around his cock, those two slick fingers against it like brands, and Crowley choked and shook and came in wrenching waves over Aziraphale’s fist.

Crowley lay where he was with his eyes closed for quite a long time. Long enough that Aziraphale smoothed his other hand along the curve of Crowley’s hip-bone in a careful caress, and seemed to disappear for a while to clean up, and then to come back and hum gently on his return. Crowley felt limp and sore and empty in a strangely comforting way, as if, for just a short while, everything unnecessary in him had simply gone away. It was very peaceful. He had nothing close to the inclination or ability to move or speak until Aziraphale murmured, “Crowley, are you all right?”

Crowley flicked his eyes open. “Yeah,” he said.

Aziraphale gave him a warm, soft sort of a smile, small and kind and rather human-looking. It made Crowley’s chest tighten.

“Sorry,” Crowley said. He attempted to clear his throat. “I know that you didn’t— if you don’t like doing it, we don’t have to, um— ”

“It’s all right, you know,” said Aziraphale, and then he slid one of his hands against Crowley’s on the bed, and held it.

Between the ache in his body and the white noise in his head and the tightness of his throat, Crowley swallowed, and let it happen. His eyes slipped away from Aziraphale’s face, from where his fingers were curled into Crowley’s, to anywhere else, to—

“Angel,” he said, dragging the word up from some just-about-extant well of himself. Aziraphale’s cock was thick and heavy between his legs. “Well then.” He unlaced his fingers from Aziraphale’s, and ran his hand slowly along Aziraphale’s thigh.

“Oh, Crowley,” said Aziraphale, sounding slightly flustered, “you don’t have to, it doesn’t matter— ”

“Shut up,” said Crowley, smiling lazily, his body anchoring itself, knitting its atoms back together, as he took the weight of Aziraphale’s prick in his hand. He stroked it familiarly, contentedly.

“Really,” Aziraphale said, “it’s not— it’ll go away in a minute— ”

“Will if I have anything to do with it,” Crowley agreed. He rubbed the ball of his thumb against the underside of Aziraphale’s growing erection and watched him shiver, push forward involuntarily into his hand. “You know, Aziraphale, I spent thousands of years _not_ doing this. Isn’t that insane?”

“Well, it was— complicated, wasn’t it— ”

“Yeah, suppose so. Point is, though, if you think there is a single opportunity I will _not_ take, now, to make you feel good, to see you like this, to watch you come— ”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, voice low, face flushed.

“You,” Crowley started, “you are…” and he meant to say something dirty, but then the thought got scrambled in his brain until all he could think to say was something kind, but then that, too, ended in a puff of useless breath as he looked at Aziraphale, angel, _angel_, the light of God singing in his veins, spilling out of the cracks in him, with his eyes dark and his soft human lip bitten.

“Do it on me,” Crowley mumbled.

“Crowley, are you sure— ”

“C’mon. Angel. I want you to.”

Aziraphale drew in a long, shuddering breath as Crowley twisted his hand around his cock, and when Crowley reached up with his other hand to catch him by the arm, he came closer. Moved where Crowley was trying to put him, knelt up and over Crowley’s hips, his knees pressed against his sides; let his mouth fall open and his breath quicken as Crowley began to work him harder, with clear intent to ruin.

Aziraphale was easy to triumph over, if you knew the tricks. He came in a hot, quick shudder on Crowley’s stomach, sending a shiver of discomfort through Crowley’s skin, until it mingled together with everything else into one welcome, exhausted ache. When Aziraphale leaned down and kissed him gently on the mouth, it just tingled.

“Mm,” Crowley said, as Aziraphale climbed off him, and then there was a strange, fluttering sensation across his skin, his lips, the tips of his fingers. Aziraphale had miracled him clean. “Hey,” he said. “That was probably all making me a better person.”

“I doubt that,” said Aziraphale.

Looking down at him with a vaguely beatific expression, Aziraphale pushed Crowley’s damp mess of hair away from his forehead. His fingers threaded through it, the tips gentling along his scalp, the pad of his thumb resting just below his hairline. Crowley hadn’t actually been there for Michael’s much-exalted moment of triumph over Lucifer himself— he’d heard there might be a bit of a ding-dong, had a feeling he was going to be expected to pitch in, and decided to show up fashionably late— but he’d seen a lot of paintings. If there were anywhere left for Aziraphale to cast him into, he’d go.

“So that was a thing,” Crowley said, inadequately.

“I could,” said Aziraphale, like someone trying to feel out the edges of a room in the dark, “bless you, you know, if you wanted. Only if you wanted.”

Crowley shivered under his hand. It might slide right off him, an oil-slick of benediction. Or it might tear him apart. Or neither. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. “Better not,” he said. “Might actually do some damage.”

“I suppose so,” said Aziraphale. He lay down again on the bed, and breathed out.

“_I_ could damn you,” Crowley said. “You ever think about that?”

The corner of Aziraphale’s mouth curved a little. “I think that would certainly have happened by now if you could.”

“Want to bet?” Crowley said. He let his eyes roll up to the ceiling above them, rolled an imaginary plum in his mouth. “O Lord, see you here this angel of heaven that thou hast wrought, and see how he bows his head before the enemy, and taketh communion, in defiance of your Word; see how he comes to my bed when I call, and forgets his good duty— ”

“Stop,” said Aziraphale, sounding surprised, embarrassed, significantly more embarrassed than Crowley thought either of them were expecting, and Crowley paused with his mouth half-open. There were points of colour in Aziraphale’s cheeks, and Crowley thought, oh, Lord, let’s… think about that later. “Shh, don’t. Someone could hear.”

Crowley swallowed. “Hope they do,” he said. And then, to the flat, grey ceiling, “Hope you’re listening. D’you see what you’ve lost? Well, too late. Chose me, didn’t he? He’s mine now.”

He heard Aziraphale’s breath slide out in a little rush, and then felt Aziraphale’s hand touch his again. Crowley looked round as Aziraphale lifted his hand from the bed, turned the palm upward, and then pressed a careful, prickling kiss to its centre.

“So,” Crowley said to the ceiling, “Bye, then,” as Aziraphale said, softly, “Amen.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/187186490717/consecrated-ground-equestrianstatue-good-omens)! And come and talk to me on there about these eternal beings who have taken over my entire brain!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Consecrated Ground](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20461502) by [triedunture](https://archiveofourown.org/users/triedunture/pseuds/triedunture)
  * [Milk, Tea, Wax](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20478341) by [rfsmiley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rfsmiley/pseuds/rfsmiley)


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